Sony fakes Blu-ray playback

[RabidDog]

Who can actually prove they circumvented copyright?? All I see is a disc with writing on it, possibly there is some movie footage on the disc .. but who knows where that came from ?

[edDV]

Who can actually prove they circumvented copyright?? All I see is a disc with writing on it, possibly there is some movie footage on the disc .. but who knows where that came from ?

It better have an audit trail or it is court time for any other company.

[adam]

I can tell you haven't operated inside a big conglomerate.

Your job is to "get it done". Lawyers can apply the law literally and find a felony. I suspect several were committed by Sony in this instance.

Yes but I'd think that the easiest way to "get it done" is to simply make the demo at the onset since you know you'll need it, rather than add protection to a disc only to remove it again. You would know better than I but as the distributor isn't it Sony who is paying to add CSS or whatever protection to the discs that they have mastered? I just think there's no reason to assume that the guys who basically own the DVD are bypassing their own protection. But like I said, even if they are its still not a violation of the DMCA if they have permission from the copyright holder and obviously they do. They're in business with them. They are demo'ing their movie for them. As far as the distribution of the movie is concerned they're basically one in the same so I don't see how any copyright law could have been broken regardless of how literally you apply it. The DMCA makes express exemption for this by excluding this type of activity from the definition of "circumventing." In any case I think its safe to assume that no legal action will be taken anyway over something so small and silly as this.

[Dr_Layne]

The DVD+R was an attempt to discredit Sony by a website. Here's the most current information from Slashdot:

Sony's Blu-Ray demo on the level. eaglebtc writes "Gearlog.com has retracted a previous accusation against Sony regarding their alleged use of a DVD+R instead of a Blu-Ray disc in a demonstration. In the original announcement, Gearlog.com claimed that Sony was using a DVD+R to demonstrate Blu-Ray technology, in an attempt to show that Sony was not ready to market the product."


Steve

[adam]

Read the comments to the retraction on gearlog. Its funny, someone else at the event explains that they guy was drunk off his ass and that's why he didn't understand that the two laptops were for comparison purposes. One had a regular DVD, albeit a burnt one, and the other had the blu-ray disc.

[InXess]

There's no Sonygate familar smell here... at least not yet.

[Bob W]

Both those laptops probably now have root-kits installed on them.

[ROF]

Read the comments to the retraction on gearlog. Its funny, someone else at the event explains that they guy was drunk off his ass and that's why he didn't understand that the two laptops were for comparison purposes. One had a regular DVD, albeit a burnt one, and the other had the blu-ray disc.

I wonder if by comparison Sony could not use an original disc because it would look to much like the high definition copy so instead they re-encoded and shrunk the movie into a horrible compressed format to make the difference much more noticeable. They would not dare use a pressed DVD. That might actually make people question which was the high def one and which wasn't.

[oldandinthe way]

Doesn't anyone care that the real meaning of this deception is that there is absolutely no reason for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Even SONY didn't feel that the image from "HD" would be any better than current technology.

The big companies have decided to commit suicide by lawyer. Perhaps fired the lawyers and if they hired some marketing folks to find out what the public needs and engineers to build it, they would not be in the process of dying.

[adam]

What are you talking about oldanintheway? There was no deception, it was a mistaken story and the market will decide whether there is a "reason" for Blu-ray or HD-DVD. You may not think its an improvement but many people like myself are extremely excited by this new technology. What makes you think that Sony doesn't view HD as being better than current technology? Wasn't the whole point of the comparison demo to show that there is a difference?

[thecoalman]

Doesn't anyone care that the real meaning of this deception is that there is absolutely no reason for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Even SONY didn't feel that the image from "HD" would be any better than current technology.

I think you're missing something, as EdDV pointed out

If the said VAIO is as claimed a BD player, then H.264 and VC-1 compression must be supported and both allow HDTV bitrates well within standard DVDR sustained transfer rate.

If the story is true, Although it wasn't a blu-ray disc it's possible according to him to get that content on a DVDR although it would be a very small amount of it. Comparing the the difference between DVD and HD is like comparing DVD to VCD... there is no comparison DVD is by far a superior looking format.

[satviewer2000]

There has been much discussion at Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.com) about this. All are not convinced that the disc in question is really the HD demo disc.

However, it is theoretically possible to burn HD video to DVD+-R discs. Sony would not have to have done the whole film. I would guess that a 30 minute excerpt set to loop would have been possible on a blank DVD disc.

Please take a chill pill all of you "Let the Feds get Sony!" people. It's NEVER going to happen. They'll leave it up to Sony Pictures or the MPAA to handle this and they won't do anything about it.

Hi-def video is simply video at a higher resolution and bitrate. It is just data. Any data can be burned to a DVD (or stored in any other computer storage medium). If you've ever heard to DVB technology, it is a very simple matter to download, store, and view high definition material on your computer. Of course you cannot fit a full length HDTV movie onto a DVD-R if it's in its native MPEG2 format. A typical 2 hour HDTV movie will use around 10GB of space. What I'm sure they've done here is simply edit the movie to fit onto the 4.4GB limit of the disc (or perhaps the disc isn't even being used, and the data is really playing from the hard drive).

[ROF]

Doesn't anyone care that the real meaning of this deception is that there is absolutely no reason for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. Even SONY didn't feel that the image from "HD" would be any better than current technology.

Who cares about image quality? I just want to be able to record in larger capacities on a disc based system. Sony has answered my request. The have given me a storage capacity of 50GB with a possibility of 200GB using the same technology. Now if they would just sell me a blu-ray burner for about $500.